Spooky season is upon us! That means it’s time for haunted house tours and corn mazes, apple/pumpkin picking and planning costumes for Halloween parties or trick-or-treating (if that’s a thing people our age still do). 

As the weather changes and fall really hits her stride, there can be a lot of pressure to go out and do everything. But you can enjoy spooky season and prepare for Halloween indoors, too. If you’re an introvert like me, you might just break out the fuzzy socks and pumpkin spice lattes and consume all of the Halloween candy and spooky media you can. So here are my top spooky season recommendations! 

Books: 

1. Anything by Shirley Jackson

Jackson is a lauded horror and mystery writer. You might be familiar with her writing; her haunting short story “The Lottery” is often required reading in high school curriculums. But I recommend reading “The Haunting of Hill House” and “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” before watching either the 2018 Netflix series “The Haunting of Hill House” or the 2018 major motion picture “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” starring Taissa Farmiga. 

1. “Full Dark, No Stars” by Stephen King

This collection of short stories by famous horror/suspense author Stephen King is an absolute page-turner. It includes four of King’s short stories: “1922” features a chilling confession of the gruesome murder the main character commits when his home and livelihood are threatened by someone close to him. The next is “Big Driver” about a mystery writer named Tess that gets abducted, assaulted and left for dead. When she wakes up among the dead bodies of several of her attackers and other victims, she gets swept up into a horrifying mystery of her own. The third story, “Fair Extension,” is the shortest of the stories. It follows a man named Dave Steeter who makes a deal with the devil to save himself from a fatal cancer diagnosis. “A Good Marriage” follows Darcy Anderson who finds evidence of her husband’s horrifying secret life while looking for batteries in the garage. Of these, my favorite and probably the scariest was “1922,” and if reading isn’t what you want to do in your spare time, then I would recommend the horrifying and incredible 2017 Netflix film by the same name. 

1. “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James 

This gothic, horror novella is considered one of the most chilling ghost stories ever written. It has everything that gothic horror should have, an unreliable narrator and creepy children who see ghosts around the house. The audiobook narrated by Emma Thompson is riveting. I can’t recommend this book enough, but I won’t say more at the risk of spoilers. 

1. “NVK” by Temple Drake

Rupert Thompson wrote “NVK” under the pseudonym Temple Drake in 2020. “NVK” is a mesmerizing story set in modern-day Shanghai. The novel is a suspenseful blending of gothic and the supernatural. In “NVK,” a Chinese executive named Zhang becomes enamored with a mysterious and mesmerizingly monstrous woman named Naemi. As the story unfolds, the reader and Zhang struggle to come to terms with who or what Naemi really is: Ghost? Vampire? Demon? 

Movies:  

1. “The Exorcist” (1973)

The 1973 classic horror movie is a cult classic in its own right. Some people claim that the movie itself is haunted as a number of the cast and crew members died mysteriously during and after filming. What makes the movie so undeniably hair-raising is its use of subliminal messages such as the buzzing of bees in the background of the early scenes to trigger innate fear in the audience. But the most horrifying thing about “The Exorcist” is that the actor who plays the radiologist in one of the film’s most disturbing scenes was a serial killer in real life. Paul Bateson, a former radiographer, had already claimed the life of one of his victims at the time of filming and went on to kill five more men. 

1. “The Fly” (1986)

Dipping into sci-fi body horror, which I could talk about until the proverbial cows come home, “The Fly” is star-studded, featuring a young Jeff Goldblum and stunning Geena Davis. Directed by David Cronenberg, it tells the story of eccentric and brilliant scientist Dr. Seth Brundle (Goldblum) as he begins to transform into a fly/man hybrid after one of his experiments in teleportation goes horribly wrong. 

1. “Coraline” (2009)

The stop-motion animated dark fantasy film based on Neil Gaiman’s 2002 novella “Coraline” is incredible. The main character by the same name is an 11-year-old girl who moves into a creepy house. After exploring the house, Coraline finds a portal to another world that is an eerily idealized version of her mundane and frustrating life. In this other world, she meets her other-mother and other-father, learning their sinister secrets. 

1. “Hocus Pocus” (1993)

A classic Halloween-themed comedy that follows a trio of witches who are accidentally resurrected by a teenage boy in Salem, Massachusetts, on Halloween in the early ’90s. 

1. “Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” (2005)

The 2005 stop-motion claymation supernatural comedy is a parody of a classic monster movie. If you didn’t grow up with “Wallace and Gromit,” then all I can say is that you should give it a chance if “The Exorcist” or “The Shining” isn’t your thing. It is the epitome of a fun-loving spooky season comfort movie. 

1. “Midsommar” (2019)

This horror film stars Florence Pugh, whose character accompanies her boyfriend and his friends on a trip to Scandinavia to attend a rural Swedish midsummer festival.  What starts as an idyllic retreat quickly devolves into an increasingly violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan, medieval cult. 

Podcasts: 

1. “Haunted Places”

The Parcast original hosted by Greg Polcyn takes you on an audio tour through a new supposedly haunted place and its haunted history. Polcyn’s calm and welcoming voice juxtaposes the  truly terrifying subject matter. There are new episodes every Thursday, so tune in for spooky legends, weird histories and riveting tales of the supernatural. 

1. “Radio Rental”

Radio Rental is British Cockney slang for going completely and utterly mad. The anthology-style podcast of the same name is set in a 1980s video rental store run by an eccentric shopkeeper Terry Carnation (Rainn Wilson) who entices the listener with his “special collection” of horror tapes he has collected over the years. This elaborate introduction leads us into the true nature of Radio Rental; each new audio clip that Mr. Carnation plays is a bizarre and real-life horror story told by the people who actually lived and submitted them. 

As someone who is really into horror, this was an incredibly hard article to write — there is just so much impactful media to come out of this genre. But these are just some things I like. Have a spooky season, goodbye.